On a cheerier note, on Tuesday I got to talking with a girl from my Historical Fictions class - one Sarah - and the conversation turned, naturally enough, to the iconic books in our lives. Hers were all Dostoevsky and Faulkner and a whole lot of French writers of whom I'd never heard before, but she said that she'd make a fuller list and I promised to reciprocate (not ever needing much of an excuse to indulge in this kind of list-making) and so voilà:
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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Mervyn Peake - Gormenghast trilogy
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Kate Atkinson - Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Donna Tartt - The Secret History
Gregory Maguire - Wicked
John Fowles - The French Lieutenant's Woman
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Haruki Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
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Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
Jeanette Winterson - Gut Symmetries
David Malouf - Fly Away Peter
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited
The first three are the ones which are really 'iconic' for me - the ones to which I return over and over, and within which I always find something new and truthful and real. The next lot are, I guess, the rest of my favourites - I love all of them, but my response is slightly different to them than it is to Lot 49, Invisible Cities and The Unbearable Lightness of Being...one way of putting it might be to say that I don't feel as if they really map out a whole design or manifesto for life in the way that the first three do. But each, in its own way, has left a deep mark on me which goes far beyond mere liking of the book.
And as to those last five, well, they're five which I don't really love any more but which also marked me very deeply in their time - indeed, each probably more deeply than any of the 'favourites' bar the Pynchon, Calvino and Kundera works. Each of them is such a huge landmark and so feels as if it's in its own place, and for some of them, I don't really know how I'd feel if I were to re-read them today. I haven't read Wuthering Heights or Fly Away Peter since high school, and quite possibly not Gut Symmetries either (though I was still into Winterson for the first couple of years or so of uni, as I've recorded elsewhere on this blog). Re-reading Foucault's Pendulum earlier this year was a disappointment - it was still good, but no longer amazing - and when I started to re-read Brideshead Revisited (probably last year, maybe '03), I found myself not enjoying it at all and hurriedly put the book down rather than risk tainting it, meaning that I've still only read it the once...
